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"There are some books one feels should be described as if they were wines, with that same loving attention to their physical qualities, to body and fullness and finish.  Calendars is such a book. These are vintage poems. . ."  Wendy Taylor Carlisle in Wind. Full Review

"The poetry of Annie Finch captivates me.  She displays poetic skill as polished as any of the greats.  I likewise find her utterly endearing. . Her poetry is an homage to the art."  —Michael Parker in MiPoesias Full Review

From Publishers Weekly
In her third full-length collection, Finch focuses on the cyclical and seasonal, centering on themes of birth, death, family and artistic lineage, sexuality and female spirituality. Following the poems of Eve (1997), the poetics of The Ghost of Meter, and the anthologizing of An Exaltation of Forms (2002) among other books and translation work, Finch here moves through traditional and invented forms, chants and refrains, makes addresses to poets of the past, and at times deploys an exaggerated musicality that is less archaic than rooted in obsessive repetition. In "Paravaledellentine: A Paradelle," for instance, the speaker sings, "Move me the way the seas' warm sea will spend me./ Move me the way the seas' warm sea will; spend me./ Move your sea-warm come to me; will with me; spend/ tender sounds, warning me the way of the seas, the seas." Some of the most compelling poems here explore the interplay of multiple voices; in the title poem, the voices of Demeter, Chorus, Persephone and Hades chant in alternation. Other successful poems move between a voice and an echo-a doubt, a qualification or a redirected train of thought. While poems centered on (and titled after) "The Earth Goddess and Sky God" or "The Menstrual Hut" can seem more a part of a personal cosmology than a space readers will want to approach, Finch almost always draws one in with an unnerving and utterly unexpected phrase or image, as when addressing "The Moon": "Then you are the dense everywhere that moves,/ the dark matter they haven't yet walked through?" Such moments seem to contain the full duration of this book's calendars.

"An oracle, an ecstatic maenad: that is the kind of traditional poet Annie Finch is. . ." Patricia Monaghan in Web del Sol:  Full Review

" . . . She gets it. Her commitment is to the language . . ."  Ron Silliman on Silliman's Blog:  Full Review

"Finch's poem speaks to a larger poetic conversation on feminist spirituality and religious revision in the work of Alicia Ostriker, Lucille Clifton, and Eleanor Wilner." D'Arcy Randall in Blue Mesa Review:  Full Review

  "Finch, who has described her work process as including the whispering or muttering, shouting or chanting or singing her words aloud as she writes, has brought that song into the words in a way that we associate with poets of an earlier era, like Tennyson or Kipling. . . "  Tad Richards in Jacket:  Full Review

'Finch has been through the experience of free verse and is trying to redefine "traditional" forms in a way which will allow her to function in what amounts to an unprecedented fashion. . . " Jack Foley in the Alsop Review:  Full Review

"With paradoxical economy and fine-tuned irony, Annie Finch's poems embody the seductive, treacherous and redemptive nature of language itself.  Her poems remind us how the condition of music re-creates the condition of thought."
--Marilyn Hacker

"Sympathies, passions--so often the opposite of actions—are so intensely held, wrung and used, that Annie Finch's poems spread themselves like so much fresh laundry:  sweet, abstergent, redressed."
--Richard Howard

"Annie Finch is a great love poet, and she understands better than any contemporary I know what poetry feels like and sounds like when it is completely at home in its traditions. . . She is a major poet, one of very few who understand how lyric lives in part because it can speak for something larger than the ego."

—Charles Altieri

Copyright©2006 Annie Finch